That reminds me...

Perspectives Archives

October 29, 2006

Trains, Planes and Ottawamobiles

One of these days, Ottawa will get a rail backbone. Hopefully it will happen sooner, rather than later or never.

Having to travel as much as I do for work is a mixed blessing. While it does give me the opportunity to see breadth of places few people do, it can be exhausting and although I'm on location, I don't often get to really see what there is to see. This ain't no vacation!

November 10, 2006

One Minute Make File

Lately, I've been doing a lot of tutorial, documentation and demo crafting at work. Nothing fancy, just screen capture stuff with annotations. I'm an engineer first...

Seeing Bre's weekly Make videos develop has got me wanting to do more and different things. Hard to believe it's been fifteen years since the last documentary soundtrack work and ten since my last orchestral performance.

January 18, 2007

Americans-Only; Fourth Amendment

Overdue for another post. Being Canadian, living in Canada but working for a company headquartered in the US, I've taken more than a passing interest in what my rights, or lack there-of, are. Take the Fourth Amendment of the US constitution for example:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

It's really quite subtle. Having grown up under constant barrage of programming produced in the US, it's all too easy to take for granted that the laws and rights trumpeted apply to us as well. As the saying goes, when you assume...

January 19, 2007

Open Captioning the Apple

The QuickTime video format already supports it and the upcoming Leopard release will have enhanced captioning support for accessibility. If their video content had captions there would be no good reason why iTunes wouldn't be able to search the caption text directly and return links to those points in the video.

It's not just about checking off that box beside "accessibility requirements" for the subset of our population that is deaf and hard-of-hearing.